🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

One of the biggest misconceptions about the CIA, according to The Recruit executive producer and former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, comes from the organization’s past portrayals in film and television. It’s not all action all the time. Ciralsky wanted to make sure that his spy thriller series, which stars Noah Centineo as young CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks, paints a realistic picture of what the covert organization is really like. 

“It’s not actually one monolithic organization working toward the same goal,” Ciralsky tells Tudum. “What I think we wanted to focus on is that it’s an organization that has parts and sometimes they’re competing. [Each part has] different missions, different interests and, like any other bureaucracy, those are sometimes aligned and sometimes they’re at odds.”

Now an Emmy-winning journalist and producer, Ciralsky began his career at the clandestine government agency and applied some of his experiences as occasional inspiration to Centineo’s character. He got on the phone with Tudum to explain the differences between a hip pocket asset and a hall file, the true definition of graymail, and other burning questions we had after blasting through all eight episodes of The Recruit. Read on for the answers.

Can a CIA lawyer be 24?

Sure can! Ciralsky was 24 and in his third year of law school when he received his offer to join the CIA; by the time he started the job, he was 25. 

Showrunner and creator Alexi Hawley says that in his research, he learned that the CIA general counsel’s office is much like any law firm: “At the CIA, they pull from a lot of different places. In the show, Lester’s a former case officer who went to law school at night, and Violet was a former judge advocate general in the Army who transferred to the CIA. You have him at 24, but then you have 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, even 50-year-olds coming in for the first time. So they’re all first years, even though they’re not new to being lawyers, which I just thought was a really fascinating mix of characters.”

Do CIA lawyers actually go into the field?

“CIA lawyers do, in fact, travel overseas for a variety of different reasons,” Ciralsky explains. “Some of that has to do with educating CIA personnel and ensuring that they’re knowledgeable of the law and where the red lines are.”

What is graymail?

According to Ciralsky, graymail is “a tactic by which a person threatens to expose government secrets unless the charges against them are dropped, most often seen with people who are defendants in a criminal case.” Yikes.

Are black passports real?

Owen runs into trouble when he heads to Yemen to investigate his case but uses his regular passport instead of a black passport (which his co-workers hid from him as a prank). What is a black passport, though? “A black passport is a diplomatic passport issued to foreign service officers or other American government personnel with diplomatic status,” says Ciralsky.

What is a hall file?

A hall file is not an official personnel file, but rather an unofficial account of “somebody’s reputation in the building at CIA headquarters or within the CIA more broadly,” Ciralsky says. “Were they a high flier? Did they recruit a lot of assets?”

What’s a nominal cover?

Without revealing too much, Ciralsky explains that a nominal cover is “a term used to describe a way of masquerading somebody’s identity, but one that would not survive serious scrutiny.” Nominal covers include small things like a phone number or a business card that wouldn’t necessarily hold up to extreme scrutiny, while deep covers are “backstopped,” or supported by entire teams. 

What’s a hip pocket asset?

“In the show, we used the term ‘hip pocket asset’ to refer to someone working on behalf of US intelligence who was not officially vetted,” Ciralsky says. 

Philippe Bossé/Netflix

What does a CIA lawyer do, really?

A CIA lawyer ensures that an organization that is, by definition, essentially breaking the law of every other country in which it operates (i.e., spying) “does so within the bounds of US law,” Ciralsky says.

Is Vienna really a spy capital?

Absolutely, says Ciralsky, thanks to the fact that many significant international organizations operate there, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations: “Every country has representation there because of these international organizations, and those can provide cover — theoretically.” In the show, Owen’s boss describes Vienna as “the Olympics of espionage,” which Hawley says he found in his research to be accurate: “That is where agencies send their most experienced and their most competent intelligence agents. It’s a hub between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and the idea that Owen knows so little that he ends up being followed by the whole entire United Nations was just something that made us all laugh.”

Does Noah Centineo really speak German?

Well, “he spoke that German,” says Hawley. “He was really diligent about learning that. He worked with a dialect coach and a language person, and I thought he sounded great.”

The Recruit is now streaming on Netflix.